Charlie Billingham

Selected works by Charlie Billingham

Charlie BillinghamWigged Bum (Yellow Dot)

2012

Oil and acrylic on conservation polyester

100 x 85 cm

Although we can identify things in Charlie Billinghamâ€™s work as part of a certain idea of the past â€“ baggy britches, towering wigs, swags of jewellery, vaguely scatological humour â€“ their presentation (in bits, in fragments) suggests a kind of dispersal, a refusal to fully cohere. Billingham holds the bits at bay: the past stays past. Late 18th and early 19th century motifs â€“ big Regency bums in wigs or britches; bonnets with cascading feathers; big-buttoned waistcoats â€“ are repeated in an array of decorative colours, either as wallpaper or as reversible motifs on canvases.

In A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion, Gillrayâ€™s satirical 1792 image of the Prince Regent (known in his time as â€śthe Prince of Whalesâ€ť) is stretched into near-abstraction, its speckles of dripped colour a reminder of Billinghamâ€™s historical distancing: print becoming paint. A six-leaf folding screen, meanwhile, composed of the bottom halves (front and back) of three different paintings of the Three Graces, with images of fountains on the other side, seems concerned with lost ideals of beauty. Their rendering â€“ loose, gestural, vague â€“ is part of their sense of absence: theyâ€™re not quite here.